float

I have been in and out of water all week. In part to keep cool through this one and only perfect summer heat wave, but mostly to float through this liminal moment in between two versions of me. This shift crept up on me; with all of my attention directed to the changes all around me, I didn’t give much thought to the changes about to begin inside of me. And yet, maybe I did. 

August brought the end of a decade’s worth of nursing my children, and it looks like September has brought the close of 24/7 days with one of my charges. So much of my speculation has been pointed in the direction of how Freddy Thistle will navigate the change and weather the transition. And of course some thought to the list of all of the things I can attempt to get done in the long stretch of time that I am not directly caring for him on these days. But I had given very little attention to the more subtle, below the surface, metamorphosis that would begin to unfold in my bones and in my blood.  

So instead of attacking my time and my list and doing all of the things that I can do with an efficiency not afforded me when I have a four-year-old in tow, I spent much of my time floating in water of one form or another. Keeping cool, but also keeping a little bit formless, a little bit undetermined. 

A friend of mine asked me on Wednesday evening something along the lines of: Did I relish my time on my own? I stumbled on my answer because in truth I do not love not having my kids with me. I never have, I sense that I most likely never will. Her follow-up question was to ask if I do not like to be alone, which caught me a little bit by surprise and I have been sitting with the feeling of that internal response since she asked. 

I actually really love to be alone. I feel the same amount of loneliness inside of myself whether I am physically alone or surrounded by people and I generally enjoy my own company quite a bit. I am skilled at entertaining myself and my practices around presence tend to be the same whether I am solo or no. Of course, I have much more time and experience clocked not alone and very much in the company of one or more of my children. But the spaces between that togetherness feel relatively seamless, so long as I am not overscheduling myself and making myself or someone else late, which is another trait of mine that I have to claim. 

But being alone isn’t what made my response to her question so difficult. Freddy had such an incredible week, better than I could have hoped for honestly, even in all the heat and humidity and his very inherited tendency to be a very Sweaty Freddy. He rolled down hills, he baked mud pies, he ran through the woods. No, it was something else entirely that felt like it started to take place inside of me. Something that I can’t map in quite the same way that I can chart his development. There is a new chapter beginning for me, one that I haven’t looked too deeply toward. 

My intention is still to stay the primary caregiver and educator for Freddy, through adolescence if not longer, and so this particular shape of two days without me is pretty much the height of time apart that I can predict. And yet, what is moving out from the center is his own growth and development. The autonomy that is his to claim as he begins more and more to author his own life. He will need me in less consistent ways. It will become a pulse of him moving out into the world, back to me, out into the world, back to me, as Maple and Eider have been doing for years. 

There is an unpredictable predictability to the whole thing. I can’t really know when or how I am needed (look alive!), and that is the work of it. And I think, also the immense fun of it. Parenting continues. In its unending and ever-changing state of being it becomes once the doing starts to recede. I am an ever-present force for my children. An energy field that they know they can return to when they need to put down the pen from time to time. I am the one who will pick up the reins when they falter and point them to water when they are dry. 

I think that is who I am becoming now and for the length of eternity. I am bleeding past my bones and past my skin and out into the wild world where I can be found anywhere. I am becoming the ocean. Which is maybe why I have been so diffuse this week, so loose and uncongealed. I have been organized and direct just enough to find my way into the next body of water. So I can float. In the space between me and me in which the home I am and will always be can lose its teether enough to occupy this bigger, and infinitely more vast, terrain.